Global Trade Nowcast

World seaborne trade is running −11.8% y/y

Volumes of goods moved by sea for the world, the euro area and 45 economies, rebuilt from daily satellite ship tracking, plus rail, road, air and land-border freight where free data exist. Updated weekly. Latest data 25 October 2026.

World exports, 4 wk y/y−11.8%13 weeks −9.3% · imports −1.7%
World exports, September y/y−8.9%imports −6.7%
Chokepoint Stress81 / 100Extreme · 76 a month ago
Suez share of Suez + Cape33%2023 normal 60%

Chokepoint monitor

Daily ship transits, 7-day average, against each passage's normal (January–October 2023 average, before the Red Sea crisis). Lines: 52 weeks, dashed = normal.

Severe below 40% of normal · Disrupted 40–75% · Constrained 75–92% · Diversion above 125% · Normal otherwise.
All chokepoints
ChokepointStatusTransits/dayvs normalvs last yearTankersMain industries

Chokepoint Stress Index

How far world shipping is from normal routing: the shortfall of transits below normal at each chokepoint (beyond a 10% margin), weighted by the cargo capacity that normally passes it. 100 = the worst week since 2023.

World seaborne trade

Tonnes moved by sea, last 4 weeks against the same 4 weeks a year earlier, weekly since 2022.

By mode: sea, rail, road, air and land borders

The same question, how much is moving, asked of every way goods travel. Each lane is compared with a year earlier in its own unit (tonnes, carloads, ton-miles, truck crossings); lanes are never added together.

Mode score: average of the mode's lanes, latest 3 months (13 weeks for daily data) against a year earlier. Momentum: simple, unweighted average of the modes with data, shown where at least two modes are covered. Grey: lagged data (more than 4 months old), shown but not scored.

Goods by rail, road and air

Canada: rail tonnes by commodity

Latest 3 months against a year earlier; bar length = tonnes per month.

Germany: cross-border trucks by neighbour

Toll-road mileage of trucks crossing each border, latest 3 months against a year earlier.

Europe's air cargo hubs

Freight and mail tonnes, latest 3 months against a year earlier; bar = tonnes per month. Month in brackets: Eurostat publishes airports with a 1–6 month lag.

What's moving: goods and sectors

World seaborne tonnage by cargo class, 4 weeks y/y. Each ship type carries a distinct basket of goods, so the split reads through to industries.

Trade by economy

Seaborne tonnage summed over each economy's ports. Click a header to sort.

Official y/y: trade volume where an official volume index exists (EU members: Eurostat, trade outside the EU, mostly by sea), otherwise trade value in local currency (OECD), latest month. Check: grade A–D for how closely tonnes have tracked the official volume (hover for detail; graded after 36 months of overlap; values are never graded). Net trade: change in exports minus imports, in % of last year's total seaborne trade over the same window. thin = under 5 million tonnes a year, read with care. Landlocked economies are not covered.

Cargo heatmap by economy

Seaborne tonnage, 4 weeks y/y, by cargo class; small figure = the class's share of the economy's tonnage over the past year. Hover a cell for the goods behind it.

Cells under 3% share are greyed out as noise. Follows the Exports / Imports switch above.

What passes each chokepoint

Cargo mix of transits, latest 4 weeks against 2023 normal. Where the gap sits shows which industries carry the disruption.

Asia–Europe: which way round?

Suez Canal transits as a share of Suez plus Cape of Good Hope transits, 7-day average. Dashed line: 2023 normal.

Sources

Sea: IMF PortWatch (UN Global Platform AIS ship tracking). Rail: AAR (via BTS/FRED), Statistics Canada. Road: Destatis/BALM truck toll, American Trucking Associations, Cass (via FRED). Air: BTS (via FRED). Land borders: BTS border crossings, Destatis cross-border toll. Computation by worldgdp.org.

What it measures

Physical volumes (tonnes, carloads, ton-miles, crossings), not value. Each source is compared with itself a year earlier. Sea is weekly; most rail, road and air series are monthly and arrive 1–2 months after the month.

Method

Year-on-year comparisons use the same days 52 weeks earlier. Methodology.

Data for AI assistants

MCP tools get_trade and get_chokepoints on the MCP server.